Hey McCain, you've got a friend

MY THO, Vietnam – In a farming village off the Mekong Delta – a 20-minute motorcycle drive away from the Internet – there’s an informal fan club of one for Sen. John McCain.

Kan** is a groupie, really.

The 30-year-old math teacher, who just broke into the tour guide biz, has quite a political crush on the Republican presidential hopeful. He proudly displays photos of the senator on his wall that he downloaded off the Internet. Given a willing ear, he will rattle off McCain’s life milestones like a fantasy baseball junkie spouting stats on the latest prospect.

And he’s following the build up to the United States’ 2008 election closely, rooting for his boy to take the White House.

“Every Vietnamese hope he will be next American president,” he says earnestly and a little brashly after quickly steering the conversation with his American guests to politics.

From the nearest city, Kan’s village is a series of right turns onto increasingly narrow roads, the last of which isn’t paved and can best be described as a path. The grass gets taller and the buildings squatter as motos speed along playing chicken with those trying to go the other direction. Then the path ends and the rest of the way must be traversed by foot over a series of rickety log footbridges.

Despite the apparent isolation, Kan is a news buff. Once a week he heads for the nearest Internet café to read about the latest world happenings. He says Voice of America is his first choice because he can read the news in his own language, but he also does his best to digest English news sources like the BBC.

“I read all the Websites my government would like to block,” he says.

Kan is a dedicated student of English. He obsessively writes down all the words he learns in a little white notebook, halting conversations to ask for the spelling and look it up in his English-to-Vietnamese dictionary and then his Vietnamese-to-English one.

As if to perform as well as practice with native speakers, he’ll pronounce a recently acquired word and then use it in a sentence.

“Dem-on-strate,” he enunciates. “In Vietnam we cannot demonstrate because the police will come and get you.”

Since achieving his goal of becoming a tour guide this summer he gets to interact with more Westerners. He leads tourists around the Cu Chi tunnels, the Mekong Delta and a city that for him, like many other Southern Vietnamese, has two names. Only when working does he refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City. In his personal life it’s Saigon.

Kan’s father fought for the Republic of Vietnam and was re-educated for nine months when the South surrendered in April 1975. In the same fashion Saigon was renamed, he went from a telephone technician to a farmer.

“After reeducation he was unhappy with this life,” Kan says, gesturing at the rice paddies and banana trees of his family’s farm.

His father slowly became an alcoholic.

“He was always drinking rice wine,” Kan says with some judgment but not scorn. “So now I don’t drink.”

But the bottle didn’t diminish his staunch anti-communist attitudes that he was vocal about until he died.

“I always follow my father’s political opinion,” Kan says.

He attributes that to why he and his three brothers didn’t have to fulfill the normally obligatory military service.

“My family background is not good for them. They’re afraid we’re CIA,” he says laughing.

His father, Kan says, hoped that by the time his children were grown “America would come back.”

Kan seems to have transferred that hope to McCain.

He talks with reverence about how even though McCain “suffered in the prison, after the war (he) came back to our country many times and shook hands with the communists who were the enemies in the war.”

McCain in the White House could only be good for Vietnam, Kan reasons. His country would have a better shot bolstering its economy and status in the world, as he envisions McCain as an ally, an American president who would pay attention to Vietnam and improve relations between the two nations.

As if to prove his theory, Kan lists all the times McCain has met with Vietnamese leaders and said the war should be in the past. His shining example of McCain’s commitment to the Vietnamese people is how McCain worked to get them special refugee status in the United States.

Kan insists he isn't alone in his adoration of McCain. It's fair to say that the Republican is one of the most well known US politicians in Vietnam. He's oft quoted in news stories as the rational voice of America. Not to say that he's universally liked, but ever since Vietnam broke away from its isolationist policies in the 1990s, McCain has earned wide respect and generous press for his advocacy on the country's behalf. He's often represented as an important architect of change in U.S. policy towards Vietnam.

Like in 1995 when President Bill Clinton normalized diplomatic relations and McCain defended the move to the largely outraged Republican Congress. And more recently, McCain was lauded for getting permanent normal trade relations established in 2006, a vital part of Vietnam's long yearned for accession into the World Trade Organization this year.

“In Vietnam, everybody like Mr. John McCain,” Kan says. “As for me, I hope Mr. McCain will be the next American president and the vice president will be a woman.”


** This story was written for an official news agency, but during the editing process we decided the Vietnamese man's candor and pro-West sentiment could get his name on a list somewhere and cause him trouble. So the story wasn't published. Since this blog has no anonymous source policy, I'm posting the story using an alias for my friend to protect him from commie harrasment.